My last post pretty much detailed the latest attempt by opponents of the Connector freeway project to exploit legitimate concern over the former Southern Pacific rail yard and potential possible contamination of the Chicot Aquifer, which provides Lafayette’s drinking water.
Well…further investigation confirms my initial belief that this is more blown up hype than actual threat. I’m not saying that clean water isn’t important, just that the screams from Connector opponents using this as a wedge to divert the project away are not as justified as they think.
The trigger of all this was a presentation on April 3rd given by the main anti-Connector group Concerned Citizens for Good Government (CCGG). They were the official group that sponsored the lawsuit in 2003-2004 which attempted to void the Record of Decision (ROD) issued in Feburary of that year, citing deliberate distortion and underreporting of harms to the neighborhoods affected by the freeway project through Lafayette. That lawsuit was dismissed by District Judge Tucker Melancon in August of 2004; whence he ruled that the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LADOTD) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) had followed correctly all its guidelines and protocols in their approval processes concerning the Connector. The ruling was appealed to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but was upheld.
The CCGG then went a bit dormant until last year, when the LADOTD, FHWA, and Lafayette Consolidated Government decided to revive the Connector design and engineering study process with their Conceptual Design/CSS Study and preparation of a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS). Reviving their opposition to the Connector project as destructive to the “heart of Lafayette”; the CCGG were backing as an alternative an eastern bypass through St. Martin Parish along the Teche-Coteau Ridge above, refered to as the Teche Ridge Bypass.
While the main opposition from the CCGG in the original lawsuit was due to the possible impacts on the Sterling Grove Historical District which lies just to the east of the Connector right-of-way; an increasing point of opposition has become the direct impact of the elevated freeway on the property formerly used by Southern Pacific Railroad up to the 1950’s for their major classification and maintenance rail yard. The Connector ROW would transverse through the former rail yard property, which stands between the current Evangeline Thruway and the existing main rail line now used by BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad.
The concern of a major project such as the Connector affecting the drinking water of a major city is most certainly legitimate, and I’m most certainly not going to cast aspersions on those who do fear the worst. However, as has been the case for much of the main opponents of this project, further research shows that this concern has been blown up so far out of proportion into a scare campaign long on propaganda and rage, and short on actual facts. That is, when they don’t twist them to suit their agenda.
Some background here: a new lawsuit is now undergoing litigation that seeks to force the original owners of the Southern Pacific rail yard property, now UPRR, to pay the full costs of cleaning up the contamination of the site; and also seeks to force the federal EPA, state Department of Environmental Quality (LADEQ), and Lafayette Utility Services (LUS) to declare the site and all water wells drawing water from the vicinity to be declared hazardous areas to be cordoned off and removed. LUS is involved in this because the main legal counsel for the lawsuit, William Goodell, Jr., had a very public press conference last December where he revealed that some contamination had been found in some LUS water wells surrounding the rail yard site, including trace elements of benzene, arsenic, and other pollutants. It is only a mere coincidence that Goodell was surrounded at his presser by representatives of the Greater Lafayette Sierra Club and by “activist” Michael Waldon. It is also just coincidence that the Sierra Club has been the principal opponent to the Connector project, and that Waldon is passionately opposed to the project enough to have a whole blog dedicated to trashing…ahhh, I mean, opposing it.
[Update (4-21-17): Michael Waldon has posted a comment to this post clarifying that he is NOT a plaintiff in the Goddell lawsuit; the correction is noted here. Also, much gratitude to Mr. Waldon for his graciousness, even if we disagree on the fundamentals regarding the Connector project.)
Which brings us to that April 3rd CCGG meeting, where Goodell, Waldon, and other Connector opponents and eco-worriers expressed their shock and horror that such a project would threaten to poison the people of Lafayette.
As we shall see, though, it’s more hype than real.
Part of the meeting was a slideshow presentation by Mr. Waldon where he attempted to make the case as to why the Connector was a dire threat to Chicot Aquifer and the water supply of Lafayette. The full slideshow is available here (via Google Drive); the group has also posted a video of the full meeting on YouTube.
For the record, Mr. Waldon’s credentials for this debate rests on his experience as a former hydrologist for the US Fish & Wildlife Service and his degrees in Environmental Engineering; he also teached at the local university in Lafayette transitioning between USL (Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana) and UL(L) (Univ. of Louisiana (Lafayette)).
Waldon starts with a history of the SP rail yard; serving freight and passenger rail traffic between Houston and New Orleans from as far back as the 1880’s up until 1959, when SP built an updated classification yard west of Lafayette near Walker Road. Strangely enough, he does not go into what happened with the property for the nearly 60 years after the rail yard was abandoned. In a previous post here, I filled in those blanks:
It should be noted, of course, that the SPRR railyard has been inoperationable since the 1950’s, and that the property has been very much inactive save for the Consolidated Companies (“Conco”) distribution warehouse located at the intersection of the southbound Evangeline Thruway and Taft Street. There were earlier lawsuits that sought to mitigate the cleanup of the site by having Union Pacific pay for the full costs, but they were settled privately out of court.
A full article with details of the etology of the Goodell lawsuit appears here.
The Conco distribution plant is the only remaining active parcel left on the rail yard property, save for a gas station located on Johnston Street between the BNSF/UP RR crossing and southbound Evangeline Thruway. The remainder of the property appears to be abandoned.
Waldon’s presentation then goes into a geological description of the Chicot Aquifer itself:
If anything, this graph actually understates the protection that the current aquifer has underneath Lafayette, because the clay layer protecting the water-laden sand is actually pretty thick in itself (15 to 20 feet), below the 30-40 foot surface soil. Considering that pilings for the Connector’s elevated structures would be dug generally to a depth of 30 feet, that should insure that the clay protective layer would not even be touched, let alone penetrated to the extent that the aquifer would be breached. Detailed soil borings that are required during the design and preliminary engineering process now ongoing would verify a lot of things.
Indeed, even if it was possible that the aquifer could be even remotely breached, it’s not as if LADOTD engineers and consultants aren’t aware of the issue and don’t have procedures and protocols available. This is straight from the 2003 Record of Decision, concerning possible impact of the Connector on the Chicot Aquifer:
In addition to all that, a Level 2 Site Assessment is now ongoing explicitly for the former railyard site as part of the Supplemental EIS, and an understanding has been reached with LADOTD where any cleanup of that site will be paid for through billing the original owners…which would be UPRR. LADOTD would be responsible for any costs of cleanup involving excavation for the pilings and direct ROW impacts.
Nevertheless, this probably won’t prevent Waldon from pushing on with his real agenda of stopping the Connector, since he apparently knows more than even the LADEQ hydrologists about the harms done by evil elevated freeways.
Moving on…we skip to this board where MW lists the contaminants that have been verified and are suspected to be found in the soils of the rail yard.
Now, that list does include some very bad dudes indeed. Arsenic can kill you in one drop. Creosote, used as a preservative for rail ties, is very toxic. No one will say that a site loaded up with that much waste shouldn’t be cleaned up, especially with a major freeway going through it. If this was Times Beach-level contamination, the hype would be worth it.
Problem is, though, the actual evidence defuses the screams of a potential toxic nightmare.
Lafayette Utilities Systems (LUS) is the local agency that regulates the quality of Lafayette’s water supply, and they are stringently regulated by LADEQ and the EPA to enforce the highest quality water standards. To that effect they are required to give an annual report on the quality of Lafayette’s drinking water using benchmark standards provided by the EPA. The last report covers inspections from 2015, and it gave Lafayette a solid, clean, bill of health regarding their drinking water supply. Remember, this covers Lafayette’s overall water quality, not just the area surrounding the rail yard. This chart from the report shows the prerequisite stats and values for the usual contaminants:
I’ve highlighted the values for some contaminants for a reason: those happen to be the very contaminants that Waldon, Goddell, and the Sierra Club plantiffs exploit the most to fuel the hyped dangers of the Chicot Aquifer being breached and polluted by the Connector freeway.
Take for example, arsenic. Waldon attempts in his presentation to magnify the threat by claiming that even a little bit of arsenic can be deadly to anyone’s water supply. What he conveniently ignores, though, is that the percentage of contamination of arsenic in Lafayette’s water is actually one-fifth of the value that the EPA declares as the benchmark for dangerous (2 parts per billion for Lafayette as compared to the 10 ppb standard). Zero, of course, would be the preferred standard, but considering that Lafayette is a huge city and that the rail yard has been inactive for nearly 60 years, there really is no danger of mass arsenic poisoning.
The same could be said of dichlorobenzene (DCB) which is a proven contaminant. The CCGG presentation (backed by a Goodell presser in January) makes major noises about how DCB has been found in the presence of water wells in north Lafayette since 2008 up to the latest 2015 report, and how that most definitely indicts and convicts the rail yard as THE source of contamination.
A look at the actual LUS 2015 report chart, though, says otherwise: the maximum rate for DCB was 0.25 ppb, as compared to the contamination benchmark set by the EPA of 75 ppb.
So…60 years of dormancy for a former rail yard has produced levels of contamination of Lafayette’s drinking water that don’t even begin to approach rudimentary levels of danger by EPA’s own standards?
Funny thing is, why wasn’t there that much concern about the railyard and its environmental after effects from these folks before the Connector freeway was envisioned? Oh, I know, the original plan was for the freeway to follow the Evangeline Thruway and avoid cutting through the rail yard site, but that would have devastated residents fronting the Thruway and McComb-Veazay. Is this newly found concern about the purity of Lafayette’s drinking water really just a ruse to find a new base for the next set of lawsuits forthcoming to halt the Connector and impose the more friendly to some people’s interest Teche Ridge Bypass?
My latter suspicion is confirmed by what Waldon does next in his presentation. He does actually acknowledge that the current Connector SEIS process now includes the Stage 2 Environmental Site Assessment for the rail yard that he originally said LADOTD would never, ever do; but then he muses that none of this is available to the public. (This is a standard grip that Waldon and the Teche Ridge lobbyists have for the Connector process overall.) Indeed, Waldon, in concluding his presentation, makes the same old tired accusations that the Connector public input process is corrupted because no one from his side was allowed to add feedback.
Of course, “no public involvement” means that Waldon and his Teche Ridge lobbyists weren’t able to dominate the Connector CSS meetings with hordes of “citizens” jumping to the mic to condemn this “evil monstrosity” and impose their “common sense” bypass route. Even though Waldon was able to literally cut and paste his entire blog into the record for the November public meeting before the Tier II process concluded. Even though Connector opponents were able to invade the Community Work Group and made an effort to impose their desired solution of Teche Ridge plus a “high speed boulevard” before they were found out and called out by Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson. But no, the “public is being denied!!”
The best response to hyperbole is still to give out the facts and let reasonable people judge them by their merits. The process will tell the tale of whether the I-49 Lafayette Connector will be a net positive for the city or not…but in the meantime, beware of fearmongers selling nonsense in the name of “protection”. The only thing they are really protecting is their privilege.